Table Of ContentIn Order to Live
Untroubled
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IN ORDER TO LIVE
UNTROUBLED
INUIT OF THE CENTRAL
ARCTIC, 1550-1940
RENEE FOSSETT
THE UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA PRESS
© Copyright Renee Fossett 2001
The University of Manitoba Press
Winnipeg, Manitoba R3T 2N2
www.umanitoba.ca/uofmpress
Printed in Canada.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system, without the prior
written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or
other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing
Agency), 6 Adelaide Street East, Suite 900,Toronto, Ontario M5C 1H6.
Cover Design: Steven Rosenberg
Text Design: Karen Armstrong and Sharon Caseburg
Maps:Weldon Hiebert
Cover photograph: Inuit at LittleW hale River, Quebec, c.1865 (NationalA rchives of Canada).
Canadian Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Fossett, Renee Evelyn.
In order to live untroubled
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-88755-171-8 (bound)—ISBN 0-88755-647-7 (pbk.)
1. Inuit—Nunavut—History. 2. Inuit—Nunavut—Social conditions.
I. Title.
E99.E7F61172001 971.9'5 C2001-910330-1
The publisher would like to thank the Archives and Special Collections, the University of
Manitoba Libraries, for permission to reproduce illustrations from the published accounts
of George Back, Henry Ellis, Charles Francis Hall, William Gilder, George Lyon, Edward
Parry, and John Ross.
The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its
publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
Industry Development Program (BPIDP); the Canada Council for the Arts; the Manitoba
Arts Council; and the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage and Tourism. This book
has been published with the assistance of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences
Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada.
To William and Andrew
and
In Loving Memory of Ussak
who told me it was cold in the snowhouse
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Contents
Maps and Illustrations vi
Preface ix
Acknowledgements xxi
Introduction: Asumptions about the Other 3
1. Empty Dishes and Days of Feasting: Human Habitation of Arctic
North America to 150 9
2. Strangers Are Necessarily Hostile: War and the Protection of
Resources, 150-1670 3
3. Fear when Winter Comes: Migration and the Search for
Resources, 1670-170 57
4.The Lands around My Dwelling: Strategies for Social
Environments, 170-1790 85
5.The Degree of Cold: Subsistence and Survival, 1790-1830 115
6. Memories of Hunger:W indfalls, Surplus, and Scarcity, 1830-1860 139
7. Skin for Soles, Moss forWicks:The Search for Predictability,
1860-1940 167
8.T he Experience of Dead Generations: Social Organization,
Worldview, and Survival 195
Apendixes 23
Endnotes 235
Bibliography 283
Index 329
Maps and Illustrations
Map Page xxiv,The Central Arctic
Maps Following Page 55
Baffin Island and Foxe Basin
Boothia, King William Island,a nd Great Fish River
West Hudson Bay
Ungava Peninsula and Labrador
North Atlantic
Hudson Strait and Frobisher Bay
Illustrations Following Page 83
Dorset and Thule artifacts
Floe-edge sealing at Melville Peninsula, 1824
Breathing-hole sealing at Melville Peninsula, 1824
Dorset house remains
Iglulingmiut women's winter clothing, 1822
Iglulingmiut winter village atW inter Island, 1822
Iglulingmiut summer village at Igloolik, 1822
People of the Savage Islands in kayaks, 1800
Umiak, c. 1904
Baffin Islander tools, 1746
Elderly woman emissary
Kakikigiu and her two husbands, 1835
niustrations Following Page 137
Inuit sleds, 1860s
Ugjulingmiut meet George Back at Great Fish River, 1834
Netsilingmiut and Arvilingjuarmiut meet John Ross, Lord Mayor's Bay, 1830
Fall village, King William Island, 1879
Tookooliktoo and Ipervik, 1864
Hudson's Bay Company trade goods
Aivilik Inuit in snowhouse, Fullerton Harbour, 1905
Shaman
Preface: Evidence and Methods
In the 300 years between the mid-thirteenth and the late sixteenth centu-
ries, encounters between the indigenous peoples of the North American
arctic and explorers and fishermen from Europe were rare, brief, and often
at a distance. Until 1576, few observers recorded what they saw. Between
1576 and 1620, a series of expeditions in search of an ocean passage from
the Atlantic to the Pacific produced more than a dozen accounts of meet-
ings with arctic dwellers, some of them in great detail.B ecause both parties
expected hostility from the other, the meetings were at arm's length, and
accounts of them were superficial and often speculative.A fter 1717, when
the Hudson's Bay Company established its post at the mouth of the Churchill
River, British fur traders began to keep more detailed records of meetings
with Inuit. A few traders, such asJ ames Isham and Andrew Graham, pro-
duced densely descriptive ethnographies of the Keewatin coast people.The
British Admiralty mounted a new and intensive search in 1817 for a far
northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and more accounts of
arctic peoples were added to the descriptive literature.
However, no systematic attempts to understand the social and political
institutions or the history of the indigenous peoples took place until the
1880s, when both Germany and Denmark sent teams of investigators to
study arctic societies as well as arctic climate, geography, and wildlife.F ranz
Boas, a recent doctoral graduate specializing in physics, mathematics, and
geography, spent June 1883 to August 1884 as surveyor and cartographer
with the German expedition to south Baffin Island. In the same years the
ethnologist Gustav Holm, with the Danish Polar Expedition, conducted a
comprehensive fieldwork study of the people of Ammassalik on Green-
land's east coast.
